U.S. officials followed the Internet trail of an al Qaeda courier to learn the details of an electronic conference between more than 20 of the organization’s top officials.

Eli Lake , Josh Rogin August 20th , 2013

Prior to the worldwide security alert that temporarily shuttered U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East earlier this month, authorities captured an al Qaeda courier who had in his possession a recording of a seven-hour Internet-hosted meeting between more than 20 senior al Qaeda leaders from around the globe, U.S. intelligence officials said.

On August 7, The Daily Beast first reported that intelligence officials had learned of a remote conference between senior al Qaeda leaders, as well as representatives from al Qaeda branches in Iraq, the Maghreb, and Southeast Asia. The conversations that occurred on the conference, put together with other communications intelligence, prompted the Obama administration (#) to take drastic security precautions to address a vague but seemingly imminent threat on Western interests being planned by the terrorist organization.

The Daily Beast has learned new details about the conference, including that it was conducted over a secure Internet messaging system and that U.S. and Yemeni officials learned about it after intercepting the communications of an al Qaeda courier, who was subsequently captured by Yemen’s National Security Bureau with help from the CIA.

Earlier this summer, the al Qaeda courier began uploading (#) messages to a series of encrypted accounts containing minutes of what appeared to have been an important meeting. A U.S. intelligence agency was able to exploit a flaw in the courier’s operational security, intercepting the digital packets and locating the courier, according to two U.S. intelligence officials and one U.S. official who reviewed the intelligence. All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

The courier (#) remains in Yemeni custody. According to the three U.S. officials, Yemeni intelligence discovered a treasure trove of information in the courier’s possession, including not only meeting minutes but an actual Web recording of the seven-hour, Internet-based al Qaeda conference between the organization’s top leaders and representatives of its many affiliates and aspiring affiliates.

The conference was conducted in classical Arabic and included proxies and leaders from al Qaeda’s regional branches as well as the heads of the group’s various committees. Some participants in the conference joined via a video connection, others communicated only through audio, and still others in the conference communicated via text. The discussion ranged from routine business affairs to theological matters, according to the two U.S. intelligence officials who analyzed the intelligence haul from the courier.

The recording begins with a video address from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda’s network. His participation surprised U.S. intelligence analysts, who believed the al Qaeda leader wouldn’t risk being part of real-time communication.

Zawahiri’s message begins with an assessment of current uprisings in the Middle East, the U.S. intelligence officials said, and compares America’s regional position with the Soviet Union in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and the communist empire collapsed. Zawahiri urged others in the conference to take advantage of America’s declining influence in the region.

Zawahiri then announced his decision to make Nasser al-Wuhayshi (/articles/2013/08/09/meet-al-qaeda-s-new-general-manager-nasser-al-wuhayshi.html) the general manager of the group for a new phase in al Qaeda’s war strategy. He then disappeared from the virtual conference, but reappeared at later points with other messages during the seven-hour meeting.

Some participants in the conference joined via a video connection, others communicated only through audio, and still others in the conference communicated
via text.

Zawahiri did not answer direct questions, leading some U.S. intelligence agencies to assess that he monitored the session remotely and provided a third party with videos to be plugged into the conference. Other U.S. intelligence analysts, however, concluded that Zawahiri did participate directly. Wuhayshi answered questions from the participants, indicating that he was participating in real time.

Since the September 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence agencies have monitored a series of password-protected websites, Internet forums, and other kinds of communications. But al Qaeda has developed advanced encryption methods and a proprietary technology allowing the group to conduct remote meetings, including video, voice, and chat capabilities.

“The technology is there for al Qaeda to have an encrypted cyber Web conference that exists over instant-message software with each other in a onetime-only chat room that disappears as soon as the conference is over,” said Laith al-Khouri, a senior consultant at Flashpoint Global Partners, an intelligence consulting group. “This can also carry video from the participants if they are using instant-messaging software that has the functionality of a video teleconference. I believe al Qaeda has that capability.”

LEC again — an entertaining article , yes . But , you idiots on the inside . Can ‘ t you idiots learn to keep your damn mouths shut . This information is intelligence and national security related for a reason . It needs to be kept secret . I should not be able to read it . Neither should others . Use your heads . Think . Keep your damn mouths shut , for god ‘ s sake !

.. This guy is actually a professor at Pasadena City College . Yeah , that means CA , folks . His pedigree is in Medieval History . So , what does he end up specializing in ? Sex and gender studies , what else did you think ?

Given the prevailing norms of sexual scholarship in academia, what’s a heterosexual male professor to do? Evidently, Hugo Schwyzer’s solution was to declare himself a progressive feminist and teach classes on pornography. He carved out a career in the field of gender studies despite the fact that his degree was in medieval history. “My mother was a second-wave feminist,” Schwyzer said in a 2011 interview. “I was raised in the 1970s with ‘Ms. Magazine’ on the coffee table and strong feminist values.… I took my first women’s studies course early in my college career…. I fell in love with women’s studies. But I was leery about majoring in it in the mid-1980s. I didn’t know any guys who did that. So I took a lot of gender-themed classes and majored in history instead.” While still working toward his Ph.D. at UCLA, he was hired at Pasadena City College in 1993 and showed his “strong feminist values” by having sex with college girls. “Before 1998 I slept with two dozen female students, somewhere in there, it’s a ballpark thing,” he told the Daily Beast last week. “That ended when I had a similar but not as bad a breakdown to the one I had now. When I got sober, I made amends to the college and swore off sleeping with students.”

By the time Hugo Schwyzer “got sober” at age 31, he had already been divorced twice, and had recently been dumped by an 18-year-old student, which “sent me spiraling rapidly downward.” He attempted murder-suicide with an ex-girlfriend, a stripper and fellow addict he had met in rehab two years earlier. None of this, however, prevented Schwyzer from becoming a tenured professor with an annual salary of more than $90,000, a published author and columnist featured at The Atlantic and at the feminist site Jezebel.com. Evidently, no one bothered to check Schwyzer’s credentials as a self-proclaimed “expert on body image, sexuality and gender justice.” As he told the Daily Beast, “I pretended regularly to have more credentials than I actually did,” admitting that the ease of his acceptance as “a very well known speaker and writer on feminism” with no more qualification than having taken two undergraduate women’s studies classes was “a little odd.”

Actually, there was a lot odd about Schwyzer’s career, but he may have seemed fairly normal among the lunatic perverts employed by sex-crazed academia nowadays. Three years ago, Columbia University political science Professor David Epstein was arrested for having an incestuous affair with his adult daughter, and subsequently copped a plea deal, but remains employed at the prestigious Ivy League school. One of Epstein’s Columbia faculty colleagues, Professor Theo Sandfort, was for many years affiliated with the Dutch pedophile journal Paidika and is co-author of the 1990 book, Male Intergenerational Intimacy, a “scientific” justification of pederasty. At a Yale University “sensitivity training” workshop in March, bestiality and incest were among the topics in a discussion that the student director of the event explained was intended “to increase compassion for people who may engage in activities that are not what you would personally consider normal.” A survey of the workshop participants found that 9 percent said they had sold sex for money, and 3 percent said they’ve had sex with animals.

In the context of academia, Hugo Schwyzer wasn’t particularly weird. He taught a course listed in the PCC catalog as “Humanities in the Social Sciences,” but which Schwyzer himself called “Navigating Pornography.” In February, when he invited famous male porn performer James Deen to speak to his class, Schwyzer was rebuked for having scheduled what PCC called an “unauthorized… public event.” In announcing cancelation of the event, a PCC official felt obliged to reaffirm the administration’s support for Schwyzer’s “academic freedom within the classroom.” The professor apparently exercised his academic freedom with tremendous zeal. “He started texting sexual messages and pictures of himself… and beginning in January, engaged in extramarital affairs with several women and one man,” the Daily Caller reported. Some of that behavior was revealed in late July, when a porn-industry gossip site reported the text messages (and video of himself masturbating) Schwyzer exchanged with 27-year-old performer Christina Parreira.

Of course, Schwyzer was not fired for his crazy perversion. Tenured professors can never be fired. Instead, PCC put him on medical leave, so he’s still collecting his $90,000 salary. His fourth wife left him and the professor is now reportedly recuperating at his mother’s house with the help of five different psychiatric medications. But he is certainly not alone in his madness, which is merely symptomatic of how American academia has lost its collective mind.